A common medieval
figure for divine union—that of the iron in the fire—will provide the model for
this three-part seminar on mystical becoming and the question of culture.
Essential to the logic of this figure is the paradoxical power of the iron, representative
of the individual or soul, to remain itself in the midst of becoming fire-like,
to be transformed precisely through its capacity to resist or withstand the
power that alters it. In this sense, the properly mystical or hidden nature of
the iron lies, not in conforming to, but in renewing itself in the fire by
intensively not being it, by hiding more
and more the depth of its originally black metal substance and thereby becoming
transformed into something at once thoroughly different from and ever more purely
itself. This paradox suggests a crucial relevance to the issue of cultural
becoming and the ongoing conflicts between traditionalisms and modernisms,
between the forces that would bind the present to past forms and those that
would sever the present from them, insofar as both fail to fulfill the
paradoxical process of authentic transformation whereby something acquires a truly
new nature by preserving at all costs its individual essence, even to the
point, as Richard of St. Victor says, of “resist[ing] the omnipotent” (Four Degrees of Violent Love). Accordingly,
this seminar will trace the contours of mystical becoming while keeping an eye
open at each stage for their present cultural and occultural implications, the
hidden dimensions of inner resistance and negation which hold the key to true
renewal. Pairing medieval texts with select discourses by Meher Baba touching on
the future of humanity, we will hide the question of culture in the fire of
mysticism in order to see and not see what emerges.

Day I: Black—Sorrow and Self-Negation

Readings:John Climacus, “On Mourning,” Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Cloud of Unknowing,
chapters 43-5.

Meher
Baba, “The Travail of the New World Order,” Discourses.

Extras:
“Sorrow of Being: In Calignem” and “The Tears of Matter: On the Crucifixion
Darkness,” On the Darkness of the Will
(Mimesis, 2018). “Secret: No Light Has Ever Seen the Black Universe, Dark Knights of the Universe (NAME,
2013).

Day II: Glowing—Desire and Movement

Readings:Richard of St. Victor, On the Four Degrees of Violent Love.

Thomas
of Cantimpré, Life of Christina the
Astonishing.

Meher
Baba, “The Life of the Spirit,” Discourses.

Extras:
“Firebox,” in Black Hyperbox (Punch,
2017). “Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: Wishing and Willing in a Cybernetic Circuit,” in
Digital Dionysius: Nietzsche and the
Network-Centric Condition (punctum, 2016). “Because It’s Not There: A
Vision of Climbing and Life,” in On the
Darkness of the Will (Mimesis, 2018).

Day III: Liquid—Union and the Now

Readings: Ibn Arabi, Whoso Knoweth Himself ....

Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls.

Meher
Baba, “The New Humanity,” Discourses.

Extras:
“Non Potest Hoc Corpus Decollari: Beheading and the Impossible,” in Heads Will Roll (Brill, 2012). “Never
Born, Never Die: Individuation, Mutation, and Mystical Birth, via Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin,” Diaphany (2015). “Inner Life | Inner
Death: On the Threshold of the Sacred,” On
the Darkness of the Will.

Whim after all is a whim; and, by its very nature, it is such that “why—wherefore—when” can find no place in its nature. A whim may come at any moment; it may come now or after a few months or after years, and it may not come at all.